Author Spotlight: Loren Maria Guay

Buy: Living Fossils by Loren Maria Guay | Pub date: February 15, 2026 | TRP: The University Press of SHSU

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What living poet/writer had the biggest influence on your book?

Let me share two for the price of one: first, Natalie Diaz’s poem “exhibits from The American Water Museum” (from the gorgeous, earth-shattering Postcolonial Love Poem) rang in my head constantly as I worked, influencing my own approach to imagining the colonized self as a series of museum exhibits. Second, Diego Báez’s Yaguareté White cracked open a world of possibility for me, showing that one could write and publish poetry about Paraguay, empire, nationality, and language in extraordinarily complex ways (and without necessarily being anywhere near fluent in Spanish or Guaraní).

Can you talk about your use of form and theory?

I will never shut up about form if you get me started. A million years ago I wrote an entire undergraduate thesis on the Catalogue of Ships in Homer’s Iliad (you know, the long part with all the ships that nobody reads) because I’m obsessed with lists, catalogues, and taxonomies. And I’m especially fascinated with the way form and its conventions allow poets to present a narrative that structurally undermines what it originally or superficially presents to be true.

In Living Fossils, for example, I have a series of prose poems in the form of “exhibition notes” that function on two levels: they describe imaginary and often ludicrous works of art depicting bizarre creatures, sure, but these narrative ekphrases are cut with italicized “alternative titles” that tell a different story about their subjects. The prose poem contains, but resistance always flashes through that containment. Another set of poems, “Diorama” and “Diorama (restored)," uses self-erasure to play formally with the idea of scraping away veneers of respectability to uncover something darker—but also more true—beneath.

What are some key themes present in your book?

Transracial and transnational adoption / the adoption-industrial complex; ecologies of empire; queer and trans survival; the violence of displaying and inventorying the self.

How did writing this book transform you?

I am a slow writer, and as I accumulated these poems over the years bit by bit, sediment upon sediment, I found that the collection’s narrative arc had radically changed along with my own. When I started writing Living Fossils, I envisioned it ending with a poem whose last lines see the speaker trapped in a future of queer death; they simply cannot imagine themselves outliving their many hostile environments. When I finally finished the collection, no one was more surprised than I was to find that it had become a narrative of trans survival instead.

You can often tell a lot about a book by how it begins and how it ends. What is the first line and last line of your book?

The first line of the book is “While you arrange me, I tell you I have seen a century of indigos.”

The last line of the book is “That their forms were anomalous / and that they have endured.”

What are you currently reading?

While the official answer is “my college students’ essays” and “my assigned texts for various PhD courses,” next up in my (dangerously leaning) personal tower of unread books are Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (translated by Erín Moure), Elisa Taber’s An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country: A Lyric Ethnography, and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s We Are Green and Trembling (translated by Robin Myers).

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Loren Maria Guay is a poet and speculative fiction writer. Their poems have appeared in beestung, ANMLY, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Breakwater Review, and elsewhere; they have been a finalist for the 2022 Peseroff Prize in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and a 2024 Periplus Fellow. Born in Asunción, Paraguay and adopted to/raised in Brooklyn, they are currently a Ph.D. student in English and Education at the University of Michigan.